Abstrakt
The study examines whether the early acquisition of the first and the second person singular pronouns, as well as the first and the second person verb forms in Czech language, is related to the Theory of Mind development. The deictic principle of the first and second person reference (1st person is always speaker, 2nd person addressee) is why it is interesting acquisitionaly. There are suggestions that children do not always grasp the correct principle of person reference at first (they use the 3rd person, make reversal errors, or use both the forms of person reference interchangeably). It might be related to Theory of Mind through the same reason. Theory of Mind is an ability to perceive people as subjective individuals and to imagine their perspective. For acquisition of the personal pronouns, children need to understand perspective of the speaker. As measures of Theory of Mind, we are concerned with (1) mental state language, (2) visual perspective taking, (3) pretend play and (4) intention understanding. We expect positive correlation between scores in the tasks on personal pronouns and scores in the tasks on Theory of Mind, even if we account for the effect of the general language development. We are concerned with 30-months-old children. We adopted four tasks from the previous studies concerned with personal pronoun production and comprehension; three tasks focused on measures of Theory of Mind; two tests of lexical and grammatical comprehension; and a 15-minutes-long spontaneous speech sample which serves for the estimation of mean length of utterance and spontaneous use of mental state language and pronouns in our subjects. The laboratory testing is divided into two 30-minutes-long parts. The paper presents preliminary data obtained from the first 17 children which suggest correlations in accordance with our hypothesis. So far, no statistical tests were conducted.